What do we do with language? Language is a social activity. The idea of illocutionary acts (e.g. promising, commanding, asserting, etc.) is the beginning of considering this notion. The nature of language is to
do something. To
do what? To interact with our environment: our peers. Language is an elaboration on a basic social space: that of multiple people coming together in the same physical space. It is an elaboration on basic gestures. Think of trying to communicate to someone who shares not a common language. Certain simple gestures are all that are available. In a very simple society basic gestures are all that are necessary, but in our technological society we must have a technological advance in our gestures: language is what is the technological advance of gesture. Language is merely complicated gesture. (It is interesting to note that such a theory [if I care to use such a "four letter word" anymore] predicts a sort of telepathy--i.e. gestures even more subtle than that of language.) But let us get back to another topic.
When we speak we tend to appear to be making categories. This is why speach or writing are difficult for me in order to make myself be understood: my very act of saying something makes the appearance of some category: the appearance that I am using some criterion as superior to the one that is the object of my critique. When I speak the conventional reader assumes that I critique old categories in favor of new, and that these new categories are implicit in my
speach. Perhaps this is not a limitation, then, of language, but a limitation of the conventional reader. But here I really am advocating a new over old: the unconventional reader over the conventional one.
I want to say that you (the reader) need to try to overcome your reaction that I am trying to advocate new categories of judgment over the old categories of True and False, Rational/Irrational, Wrong/Right, Good/Bad, etc. I.e. you need to try to take my words not as advocating
anything but merely addressing existence in it's pure form--i.e. unpartitioned, undifferentiated by any categories. But in this I am implicitly advocating the category of New Reader over Old Reader. Am I? It seems so, and indeed it isn't even very implicit but rather explicit when I come out and say it. And my above theory of language as gesture seems to be of a very conventional form: the better theory arguing against the worse.
Then it would seem that the only way to keep from contradicting myself is to contradict myself--or at the very least keep changing my mind. And this is the case in order to keep from judging the Old from the perspective of the New. Perhaps this explains the difficulty of some of the post-modern/post-structuralist writing--Lyotard, and Derrida to name a couple (i.e. the ones I have read).
Of course the post-modern (whatever) does not admit of an objective space in which to place the discourser--i.e. objective discourse is not possible: the discourser is always biased. But this is just theory, not the reality--never the reality, but the reality is the problem, but language is what we humans want to do, but language cannot (ever) be reality because language is not reality. And this would be predicted by my theory of language as gesture, but that would be cheating to say so because the theory is not the reality. Aporia!
